Florida football: Florida State game injury report for the Gators.

Football at Florida is preparing to play host to the No. 5 Florida State Seminoles tonight in an attempt to secure bowl eligibility with a sixth victory.

Both teams will be without their starting quarterbacks and are coping with injuries of their own. Jordan Travis and Graham Mertz are both out for the season.

Florida has nine players on their injury report going into this game who are probably going to be out tonight.

Who will be absent for the Gators in Florida football?
Graham Mertz: Mertz leaned into a hit to gain a significant first down against Missouri, which resulted in a shoulder injury. Max Brown is now prepared to take over and guide the offense.

Shemar James James suffered a dislocated kneecap during the Florida-Georgia game’s warm-ups, which will prevent him from playing for the remainder of the season.

Keon Zipperer—Zip will be recognized on senior night, but he will miss his final Gators home game because of a knee injury.

Caleb Douglas: Since suffering an injury during the Kentucky game, Caleb has been unable to return to the field.

Jonathan Odom: Despite missing some time due to an upper-body injury, Odom was a reliable member of the offense in the early going of the season.

Jack Pyburn: Pyburn will miss the remainder of the season after tearing his ACL against Arkansas.

Justus Boone: Boone has missed the entire season due to a knee injury, so this is hardly breaking news.

Cam Carroll: Similar to Boone, Carroll has missed the entire season due to a knee injury and will not play for the Gators this autumn.

Caden Jones: A rookie offensive lineman, Caden has yet to play in a game this season and will also be absent from Florida’s last home game.

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On Saturday, Florida football was one play away from defeating Missouri, ranked ninth. That isn’t hyperbole—Florida is 6-5 and guaranteed a bowl game if the Gators stop Missouri on fourth and 17.

Unfortunately, though, and Billy Napier discussed what he believed went wrong with the conversion, they didn’t.

Football in Florida: Just one play away
With essentially just one play reversed, Florida wins for the second time in three weeks. The game went into overtime against Arkansas because of the disastrous field goal sequence that resulted in Trey Smack’s missed kick.

Florida failed to stop Missouri on fourth and 17, and the Tigers went on to win the game by kicking their own field goal.

Regarding the unsuccessful stop, Napier stated the following during his Monday press conference:

We simply need to perform a little bit better in the field’s hook areas on the fourth and seventeenth calls. Players are positioned there; we simply need to be a little more alert.

When prompted to elaborate:

“We made the calls we made, and I believe we have players in the vicinity of the finish. We must distribute a little bit more effectively within our zones. Rush four was executed by us. We spent a lot of time discussing these “four down, gotta have it” scenarios and ultimately decided on what we felt was best at the time, but hindsight is 20/20. Often, it’s more important how you do something than what you do. Both have a coaching and player component.

Napier didn’t go into detail about the specific call, but it seemed like some kind of quarters coverage. Mannie Nunnery is left covering grass after failing to fall back to the first down marker, leaving Jason Marshall with two receivers, including Jaydon Hill, outside.

Therefore, even if Princely Umanmielen is held on the play and it is not called, it does seem like a daring move on the part of Florida if their intention was to match a linebacker against Luther Burden, the top receiver for Missouri. It doesn’t seem like the best use of resources to rely on your backup linebacker to drop 20 yards into a zone when Marshall was supposed to pass off his guy and come down on Burden.

This Saturday, Florida and FSU will play inside The Swamp. You can listen to the whole press conference Napier gave here.